Donald Trump Now Has Personal Information on 200 Million Americans

Donald Trump has had his differences with the Republican Party, threatening multiple times to run for president as an independent during his highly unusual run. He’s waffled in public about the subject but perhaps a bigger indicator of where he’s headed is his campaign’s signing a deal with the Republican National Committee to be given access to the party’s voter registration database.

For the Trump campaign, it means access to a database containing a trove of information on more than 200 million Americans, which can be used to power a get-out-the-vote effort. And for the RNC, it means that any information Trump collects from his supporters, many of whom are not traditional Republicans, will be fed back into the database for future use by the party and its candidates.

The agreement, which was confirmed by multiple sources, is similar to one signed by the campaigns of most of the candidates for the GOP nomination. […]

The list-sharing agreement doesn’t require Trump’s campaign to pay for access to the voter data, but it does suggest that Trump’s campaign has invested at least some cash in a data operation. That’s because the RNC requires campaigns to demonstrate a certain level of technical aptitude before such deals are executed. The RNC also requires candidates seeking to enter list-sharing agreements to vow to support the party’s eventual nominee.

The RNC initially offered its file to Trump not long after he declared his candidacy in June, and it’s unclear what caused the delay in executing the agreement.

The move comes amid a series of reports that people who support Donald Trump are less likely to be regular Republican voters and also that the billionaire’s efforts to organize support in the early contest state of Iowa have faltered. According to the New York Times, Trump’s campaign had promised to recruit a local leader in every one of Iowa’s 1,681 Republican precincts by the end of November but had instead recruited less than 200.

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A journalist, television producer, and web designer, Matthew Sheffield is a Bold contributor. Previously, he was the managing editor for the Washington Examiner, a columnist at the Washington Times, and the founder and executive editor of NewsBusters.